At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus.

The clandestine operation has not been previously reported. It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation.

Reuters identified at least 300 accounts on X, formerly Twitter, that matched descriptions shared by former U.S. military officials familiar with the Philippines operation. Almost all were created in the summer of 2020 and centered on the slogan #Chinaangvirus – Tagalog for China is the virus.

  • masquenox@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Our government’s grievances are of their government. Not the people.

    Have you noticed how all those nukes the US government maintains don’t target governments but population centres instead? The mass-slaughter of civilians have always been the US way - this time, they just did it with misinformation.

    • Madagaskar_sky@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      They don’t target population centers, they target military bases that always happen to be near a population center. In the 50’s and 60’s missile targetting was shit so they had megaton yield bombs to make sure they got the bases. Nowadays they have lower yield bombs so they can have more bombs that specifically target bases.

      It’s no use targeting population centers as those bombs could be used instead to cripple them militarily. It’s just that no country would have a good day if nukes went off anywhere near them.

      • masquenox@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        They don’t target population centers, they target military bases that always happen to be near a population center.

        That’s exactly the excuse they used to justify every aerially-delivered atrocity from Hamburg to Hanoi. Britain was routinely doing it in the middle-east nearly a decade before the Nazis did it at Guernica.

        If you don’t want to believe me, you can believe Curtiss Le May himself.

        There are no innocent civilians. It is their government and you are fighting a people, you are not trying to fight an armed force anymore. So it doesn’t bother me so much to be killing the so-called innocent bystanders.

        The mass-slaughter of civilians was the point then, it’s the point now - the nuclear ballistic missile is simply the logical conclusion to this. It literally allows for mass-murder at the push of a button.

        You need to stop confusing the propaganda with the actual reasons.

      • masquenox@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Didn’t say you were… that’s not the point. The point is that the US has always treated civilian populations as perfectly expendable - to be kind of honest, I’m not even sure they don’t see the US population in the same way, either.